Sark Spring

A feudal feud in the Channel Islands.

Sark’s old families see the billionaire Barclay twins as a threat to their traditions.Credit Illustration by Neil Gower

Just before bedtime on January 5th, Diana Beaumont collapsed while brushing her teeth. Beaumont lives on Sark, a small, autonomous island twenty-five miles off the coast of Normandy, with her husband, Michael, the island’s seigneur. She is seventy-six and had been in poor health. The Seigneur summoned the island’s doctor, a young transplant from London named Peter Counsell, who determined that Mrs. Beaumont had suffered a stroke. He arranged for her to be evacuated to the nearest hospital, on Guernsey, by lifeboat. Despite bad weather, the journey proceeded uneventfully. Mrs. Beaumont was treated and, in time, returned to Sark.

A week after Mrs. Beaumont’s stroke, the latest issue of the Sark Newsletter appeared in mailboxes around the island. The Newsletter is self-published and mostly written by Kevin Delaney, the managing director of Sark Estate Management, a development company owned by Sir Frederick and Sir David Barclay. The Barclays, identical-twin billionaires from England, own—through a family trust—the Ritz and the Telegraph, among other properties. In the past five years, they have bought up almost a quarter of the land on Sark, and a number of its businesses. As tax exiles, they technically reside in Monaco. Occasionally, they alight on Brecqhou, an eighty-acre private island that is separated from the rest of Sark by a narrow channel. Standing on the rocky headland of L’Eperquerie, a favorite picnic spot, a Sarkee can just make out the four turrets of the Barclays’ mock-Norman Gothic castle—one of the largest built in the twentieth century, with a gun battery and monogrammed drainpipes.

Under the headline “THE EMERGENCY MEDICAL EVACUATION OF MRS. BEAUMONT: WILFUL NEGLIGENCE,” the Newsletter excoriated the doctor’s decision to call the lifeboat for Mrs. Beaumont, given that the Barclays had offered to make their helicopter available in emergencies. (Helicopters are normally forbidden on Sark, because residents feel they would disturb the quiet.) The article insinuated that the doctor had submitted to political pressure. “Who made the decision to reject the Brecqhou helicopter?” the writer asked. “Who made the decision to send a seriously ill octogenarian lady on a boat trip in rough seas and gale force winds and a two and a half hours’ wait from the call-out?”

Relations between the Barclays and Sark had never been warm. Since buying Brecqhou, in 1993, the brothers had chipped away at Sark’s four-hundred-and-forty-seven-year-old constitution through a series of lawsuits. Sark was Europe’s last feudal state, and, traditionally, the seats in Chief Pleas, the island’s legislature, had been dominated by landowners. “What’s good enough for William the Conqueror is good enough for us!” Sark’s establishment had long maintained.

The Barclays spent much of the nineties arguing, unsuccessfully, that Brecqhou didn’t belong to Sark. Then they positioned themselves as reformers, overturning primogeniture and the treizième, an archaic perquisite that, until 2007, entitled the Seigneur to an eight-per-cent cut of any real-estate transaction. (Today, he receives an annual stipend of approximately twenty-eight thousand pounds, paid out of public funds.) “The historic problem with Sark is that it has been dominated by a single interest for most of its recent history, that of the present Seigneur and his family before him,” the Barclays have said, through their lawyer.

In 2008, after years of legal pressure, the island held its first free election. (The Barclays have an outstanding claim before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which calls for further reforms to Sark’s government “to defeudalise its constitution fully.”) To promote their platform, the brothers put out a “Manifesto for Sark,” a stylish brochure in which they detailed their vision for an upscale tourist destination, with a funicular railway and a helipad. Ninety per cent of Sark’s voters turned out for the election. They rejected seven of nine candidates that the Sark News (the precursor to the Newsletter) had endorsed as the island’s “safe pairs of hands,” and elected nine of twelve candidates that the News had blacklisted. The day after the election, Delaney, the Barclays’ man on Sark, shut down the Barclays’ businesses on the island, putting a hundred and thirty people—nearly a fourth of the island’s population—out of work, two weeks before Christmas. The businesses eventually reopened; Delaney says that workers were paid for the time lost. Yet many islanders felt that the Barclays, for all their talk of democracy, had behaved like despots.

The attack on the doctor took many Sarkees aback. Counsell had been so conscientious about his round-the-clock responsibilities that, in four years on Sark, he had never had more to drink than a half-pint after badminton. Previously, the Newsletter had directed its opprobrium at members of Chief Pleas (called conseillers), many of them from venerable families, whom it saw as a corrupt bloc bent on obstructing the Barclays’ efforts at modernization. Now a neutral figure had been injured. As the mistrust curdled into acrimony, Counsell gave notice. Complaining of “immense stress,” he wrote, “The political agenda of the Newsletter and its relentless pursuit of it by whatever means it chooses has led me to conclude that I have no option but to try to protect my family by moving away from Sark.”

On the morning of February 11th, about a hundred residents staged Sark’s first political demonstration in living memory. Swaddled in earmuffs and North Faces, they marched down the Avenue, Sark’s main drag, to the offices of Sark Estate Management, to protest the Newsletter’s treatment of the doctor and what they saw as the Barclays’ disregard for their way of life. They waved placards with such slogans as “Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbour’s Island.” As the wind blew, a woman read a poem: “We need our doctor / and he works night and day. / We cherish his family / and we want them to stay.” (One of the Beaumonts’ sons, himself a doctor in England, wrote a public letter attesting that his mother had “received the very best care.”) Speaking to reporters, Delaney dismissed the crowd as “a typical rent-a-mob organized by Sark’s feudal regime.”

Since the doctor’s resignation, “the situation,” as it’s referred to on Sark, has worsened. In late April, an explosion went off near Sark Estate Management’s offices. Delaney offered a ten-thousand-pound reward to anyone who would identify the perpetrator. He insisted that the incident be investigated as an act of terrorism, even after it emerged that the bomb was only a crow-scarer. According to an article that appeared this month in the Guernsey Press, police were recently summoned to Sark to investigate an islander who “had expressed a wish to shoot Mr. Delaney in the legs.”

A man seemingly happy to live among people who hated him, Delaney provoked much intrigue on Sark. Samizdat postcards mocked him as “Kevin Delooney,” a servile Barclays buffoon. Several times a day, he ventured to the Avenue, flanked by men his opponents called “bodyguards.” He would check in on one of his tenants, or make a deposit at the bank, and disappear, trailing clouds of aftershave. The BBC came to town to cover the doctor’s resignation, but Delaney refused to talk. “Sark used to be the kind of place you’d dream of moving to,” Sarah Montague reported. “What’s shocking for someone who knows it is to see how much it’s changed.”

Delaney seemed torn between conflicting impulses toward secrecy and exhibitionism. The Barclays had acquired three of six hotels on the island, whose economy largely depends on tourism. (They co-own a fourth.) Few people understood how Delaney hoped to fill them amid such discord. One page of the Newsletter would feature an ad for Le Petit Champ hotel, “a peaceful haven offering excellent dining in the two AA rosette awarded restaurant” and “the Sunday papers on a Sunday”; another would decry “the perverse and corrupt feudal system that continues to dominate Sark politics.” But Delaney saw himself as a lonely revolutionary, unafraid to take on Sark’s cabal of old boys. He sent a copy of some issues to the European Commission President, José Manuel Barroso, and Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations Secretary-General.

At the Easter session of Chief Pleas, the conseillers were supposed to be discussing such matters as the regulation of nettle wine, but, according to the minutes, few of them could resist addressing the situation:

Conseiller Andrew Prevel:

As a true Sarkee, he found this episode in Sark’s history not only shocking but very disturbing. That the Barclay Brothers, supposedly honourable Knights of the Realm, and their minions are able to threaten and bully the people of Sark to achieve their own hidden agenda is inexcusable. The only analogy he could come up with is the jackboot but using £1.8 billion instead of a gun. . . . He suggested that now is the time to stand up for the Sark we all love before it is destroyed.

(The Assembly applauded this impassioned speech.)

In normal times, Sark is a peaceable community. Its rocky coastline frills the island like a cupcake wrapper. On top of the cliffs, hedges line dusty paths surrounded by meadows of bluebells and foxgloves. The sounds of Sark are bees buzzing, loud as jets in the quiet, and plinking bicycle bells.

In late May, I met with Jo Birch, who had grown up on Sark and moved back about seventeen years ago, to live on some family land. Birch greeted me cheerfully, describing a brisk swim she had taken, the day before, in fifty-eight-degree water. “Well, you feel that you’d like to kick summer off, don’t you?” she said. Later, she showed me around the Seigneur’s gardens, where she works part time. As we drank tea in the greenhouse, her mood turned dark. “I think Sark will just become a mini-Brecqhou,” she said, fiddling with some robin’s eggs she’d placed on a scale.

Sadie Davies, one of Birch’s co-workers, joined us. “This island is enduring a hostile takeover,” she said. “The Barclays are manicured, polite, and very affluent people who know nothing about little wild islands. You either have to do what they say or get off.”

Birch was wearing a button with the image of a primrose—an underground symbol of her opposition to the Barclays. She said, “It’s Sark Spring.”

Michael Beaumont became the twenty-second seigneur of Sark when his paternal grandmother died, in 1974. Sibyl Hathaway, the indomitable Dame of Sark, had ruled the island for forty-seven years, after inheriting the title from her father, whose grandmother bought it off the Le Pelley family, which had acquired it in 1730 from creditors of the descendants of the nobleman Hélier de Carteret, to whom Elizabeth I, in 1565, first granted the fief “with all its rights, members, liberties and appurtenances, and all and each of its castles, fortresses, houses, buildings, structures, ruined or collapsed with age, lands, meadows, pastures, commons, wastes, woods, waters . . . vicarages, chapels and churches of every kind,” on the condition that he insure its continuous habitation by forty armed men. Beaumont’s seat is a seventeenth-century manor called La Seigneurie. (A couple of years ago, as Diana’s health failed, the Beaumonts moved to a cottage on the estate’s grounds.) Its corners yield the relics of generations: a whalebone seat; a wood-and-cane wheelchair; a tithe cart used, until 1957, to collect every tenth sheaf of wheat. A recent visitor almost tripped on a cannon ball.

Sark is three miles long and a mile and a half wide. As a crown dependency, it is part of the British Isles, but not of the United Kingdom. Each year, the Seigneur pays £1.79 to the Queen to renew the lease. In return, she and her representatives, who retain a vague obligation to insure Sark’s “good governance,” largely stay out of its affairs. Until 2000, divorce was not recognized on Sark. A Sarkee can still issue an injunction (to stop a neighbor from building a fence, for instance) by reciting the Lord’s Prayer in French and an oath called the Clameur d’ Haro: “Haro! Haro! Haro! À l’aide, mon Prince, on me fait tort!”

Beaumont is entitled to any flotsam or jetsam that washes ashore. Until 2008, he was the only person on the island who could keep an unspayed bitch. The lordly stuff is shtick—a mid-Channel Medieval Times—but only to a degree. “Sark is not a sort of feudal pageant to amuse visitors,” the Dame wrote in her 1961 autobiography. “It is a real live community of people who are happy to have retained their ancient form of government, and possess a subtle dignity of their own, born of many years of independence, honorable work and satisfied old age.”

Sark is defined by what it resists: cars, street lights, income taxes. You need a headlamp to get around at night, biking on unpaved trails under a dark sky spackled with stars. According to a guide to offshore tax havens, “Sark is probably the only true remaining Fiscal Paradise in the world and the ideal island for anyone who requires, or desires, absolute seclusion.” Or, as Swinburne put it, “Here might not a man drink rapture of rest?”

The island has always attracted its share of chancers. In 1990, an unemployed French physicist, convinced that he was the rightful heir to Hélier de Carteret, attempted to stage a one-man coup. Given that order on Sark is maintained by a volunteer constable—who, at the time, happened to be a dairy farmer—this might have been doable, except that the physicist, upon arriving, posted a sign proclaiming his intention to take over the island the next day at noon. When the time came, the constable, arriving on his tractor, found the intruder changing the magazine in his gun at the side of the road. The constable jumped him and took his weapon. Michael Beaumont remained seigneur.

In 2009, after forcing the free elections, the Barclays sued to strip the Seigneur of his remaining political powers. (He can veto legislation in Chief Pleas, and he appoints the seneschal, the island’s chief judge, who presides over the legislature for life.) The courts, while conceding that the arrangement on Sark would not have been preferable “if one were starting from scratch,” ruled that it was acceptable under statute. (Chief Pleas subsequently voted to split the seneschal’s role; a new president will be elected, and a new judge appointed, in February.) The next year, David Barclay wrote to Michael Beaumont, offering to buy his title for two million pounds and to relinquish all the privileges associated with it to Chief Pleas. Beaumont declined, claiming that “the majority of established Islanders would be horrified if I relinquished the Fief and my wife and I wish to continue living here which I believe would not be feasible should I do so.”

One morning, I visited Beaumont at his cottage on the grounds of the Seigneurie, where, as Ed Caesar recounted in the Independent, he used to keep, “in the downstairs loo,” decades’ worth of confused correspondence, addressed to the Seigneur of Shark; His Excellency, the Governor General of Sark; the Sir of Sark; Lord Michael Beaumont; His Highness, Sire of Sark; the King and Queen of Sark; the Lord of the Manor; His Grace, Michael Beaumont; and J. M. Beaumont, Head Gardener. A genial man with an underbite and a plastic watch, the Seigneur gently lamented the demise of feudalism—“I mean, everyone was happy with it”—while insisting that, anyhow, his role was largely ceremonial. “I suppose I don’t do much of any use nowadays,” he said. To loyalists, he is King Arthur; to the Barclays’ supporters, he is Junior Soprano.

Beaumont spoke of his pride in Sark’s patrimony, but he hedged when I pressed him on what he was willing to stake on a fight with the Barclays. “Everybody has access to the law just like everybody has access to the Ritz,” he said. “You cannot afford to take on people with lots of money, because they will bankrupt you.”

Lore has it that the Barclay twins can be distinguished from each other by the way they part their hair—David on the right, Frederick on the left. They are rarely seen in public; newspapers invariably print a picture, taken in 2000, of them receiving their knighthoods wearing matching purple ties. “They’re two halves of the apple,” a business associate once told the Chicago Tribune. They were born in London on October 27, 1934, to Frederick and Beatrice Barclay, Scottish migrants who ultimately had ten children. David is the elder, by ten minutes. The twins left school at sixteen, signing on as bookkeepers at General Electric and then at Schweppes. Finding the job boring, they started a painting-and-building business. Meanwhile, Frederick helped to run Candy Corner, the family tobacco shop, in Kensington.

Eventually, the brothers set themselves up as real-estate agents, and in the nineteen-sixties they began buying and renovating hotels. By the mid-seventies, they had borrowed nine and a half million pounds from a governmental lending agency and were badly overextended. Insolvency loomed, but the agency collapsed, and many of their debts were written off. The Barclays were nearly fifty when they acquired the Ellerman Group, a shipping and brewing concern. In the Times of London, Sir David Scott, then the group’s chairman, recalled meeting the brothers: “Punctually at nine the next morning, the doorbell of the flat rang and two almost identical small men dressed as for yachting appeared, looking for all the world like a pair of not-so-young juvenile leads from ‘The Boy Friend.’ ”

The brothers have an estimated fortune of £2.2 billion, making them the twenty-sixth-richest people in the United Kingdom, according to the Sunday Times Rich List. Since 1989, they have given away more than twenty-five million pounds, mostly to medical charities. They amassed much of their fortune by taking over companies at opportune moments. “They do not buy businesses in distress,” a friend told the Tribune, of their financial philosophy. “They buy good businesses from distressed owners.”

Though they own the Telegraph, they are famously averse to the press. Some observers have speculated that their distaste for publicity stems from the nineteen-fifties, when David’s wife, Zoe, served as the National Dairy Council’s “drinka pinta milk” girl. Whatever its origins, it is ferocious. Last year, Sark’s postmistress tacked a spoof of the brothers, from Private Eye, to the bulletin board at her general store, which houses the post office. Within days, she received a letter from the Barclays’ lawyers, threatening a defamation suit. Then the Newsletter ran a front-page story accusing her of snooping in islanders’ mail and saying that she was unfit to run the post office. Her fiancé was described as a “foul-mouthed bully and drunk.” It went on, “Sark is unable to pass a law restricting the freedom of the press, in other words The Sark Newsletter, so the next-best way to achieve this objective is to restrict its delivery process—as happened in Franco’s fascist Spain and Hitler’s Germany, where the free press was forced underground and delivered after dark.” The Barclays have said, “Those engaging in public life must expect to have to deal with challenge and scrutiny.” The Newsletter’s tone, they contend, “is proportionate to the importance of the reforms and the intransigence of the feudal establishment.”

One day, I visited Peter Counsell, the soon-to-depart doctor, at his clinic. A sign on the front door asked patients to remove their muddy boots; another warned that there was “an infection causing vomiting and diarrhea spreading through Sark at the moment.” In the waiting room, filled prescriptions sat out on a shelf, to be picked up according to the honor system.

Counsell seemed stressed, and he checked my identification before he would speak. “This has created a huge amount of misery,” he said. “A lot of people have been very, very upset.” Counsell had moved to Sark because he wanted to live somewhere where he wouldn’t have to commute. He’d been slow, he said, to apprehend the distress that a newsletter could wreak upon a small community. “A lot of people looking at it from the outside will say, ‘What?’ ” he said. “ ‘A newsletter? About what? Cake stalls at the church?’ But its effect is huge on the island because it dwarfs every other form of media.”

That afternoon, the adherents of Sark Spring gathered for a meeting around Jo Birch’s dining table. The group numbered about a dozen, including several conseillers. Birch put out some Jaffa Cakes and poured glasses of wine. The room smelled of the sweet peas that Birch had clipped from her garden and arranged in a pitcher.

They started to talk:

“They’re just churning the place up! We heard skylarks for the first time in years, and, the following weekend, their machines were there, ripping up ground where the birds were nesting.”

“It’s a totally unsuitable site for a vineyard—right in the teeth of southwesterly gales.”

“They’ve systematically attacked people in positions of authority. It was the doctor on one occasion, the postmistress on another.”

“Part of the aim of the Newsletter is to divert us from the business of running the island.”

“It just pervades everything. We used to think about nice things, like planning our next beach barbecue.”

“We weren’t as brave then as we are now.”

“Or as embittered.”

“I’m trying not to look through rose-tinted glasses, but I’m sure we were happier before these two gentlemen showed up.”

In the “Manifesto for Sark,” the Barclays vowed that their interest in the island was practical and sentimental, not mercenary: “Our motivation is the common interest of Sark and Brecqhou, as well as a genuine love for the Bailiwick, where our family has spent a considerable amount of time for decades past.” But, in ways, Sark is a good business with distressed owners, or at least somewhat compromised ones. For a tax haven, Sark had never had a particularly licentious atmosphere; instead, its decadence was financial. From the mid-nineteen-seventies until 1999, many residents (including the Seigneur) participated in a scheme that came to be known as the Sark Lark. In return for a fee, they signed on as nominal directors of thousands of companies that, in some cases, they had never heard of, allowing the companies to conduct their affairs unchecked by regulators. The scheme was not illegal, but it gave Sark a reputation as a place to obscure enterprise rather than nurture it.

The Sark Lark also set up a class tension on the island, which the presence of the Barclays has exacerbated. The priorities of people on Sark (mostly older ones) who had inherited money, made money on the Sark Lark, or made money elsewhere, and saw Sark as a means of maintaining it, clashed with those of people (mostly younger ones) who either had to find a way to generate money on Sark or leave. When the Barclays brought year-round employment to the island, the richer residents perceived a threat—the more the Barclays turned Sark into a company town the more the Barclays would be the island’s overlords. When the Barclays cleaned up the Avenue, the Old Guard said they had liked it scruffy. When the Barclays planted vineyards, they complained about the loss of grazing land for the sheep. Poorer Sarkees and transient laborers tended to be less political. Many of those who spoke with me did not want to be named, out of fear that their neighbors would brand them traitors. They considered working for the Barclays their generation’s hustle. They appreciated that they didn’t have to go to Guernsey to sell Christmas trees, whether or not the Barclays were turning the island into a theme park.

One night, Susan and David Synnott, an expatriate couple near their sixties, invited me to dinner at the Seigneurie, where Beaumont has allowed them to live, free of charge for ten years, in exchange for undertaking renovations. (The Newsletter smells a plot to unload the place.) David, an Irishman who inherited money from his grandfather (“After two sets of death duties, I got the daughter’s share, you see”), said that they had decided to move to Sark from South Africa after coming across an advertisement in Country Life.

“We did not want a high-tax jurisdiction,” he said. “We looked at the Isle of Man and decided the restaurants were rotten. We looked at Malta and decided it was overcrowded, expensive, and rather squalid.”

We were sitting in the mansion’s tenebrous library. Clippings about the situation spilled out of dozens of binders. The Synnotts, like others on the island, maintained a pile of back issues of the Newsletter, to which they referred from time to time.

“I think it’s a great pity that Sark’s wonderful traditions have been taken by the Barclays,” David said. “This, to me, is a bit like dismantling Stonehenge stone by stone to build a motorway services station.”

He continued, “The people who work for the Barclays are all overpaid. The system is to pay people more than they could earn elsewhere and then put demands on them.”

He excused himself to go up into the signalling tower. “I’ve got to lower the flag.”

Earlier that day, I had met with Ros Rolls, a happy-go-lucky New Zealander in a cowrie-shell necklace and a newsboy cap. Rolls moved to Sark five years ago, with her three young daughters, whom she was raising alone. She grew organic produce at Le Moinerie, one of the Barclays’ hotels. She showed me around the vegetable beds, where she was cultivating five kinds of lettuce. We passed by some blackberry bushes. “Next year, we’re getting a fruit cage!” she said.

The Barclays, Rolls said, were decent bosses. They had paid for her and her fellow-gardeners to take a class on horticulture. “They’re pretty good—like, they buy us waterproofs and pay us for a half hour’s lunch,” she said. She acknowledged, however, that the Newsletter was making things awkward with her friends and neighbors: “I think if they just concentrated on the positive things, and didn’t go around slagging everybody off, then people would know that they’re all right.”

That night was the soft reopening of the bar at the Dixcart Bay, Sark’s oldest hotel. Once a haunt of Victor Hugo, the Dixcart had fallen into grand disrepair. The Barclays had recently fixed it up. The place was gleaming, with patio furniture and bud vases. The grounds, where Delaney planned, “of an afternoon,” to host recitals from West End shows, looked as though they’d been draped in felt.

Some off-duty Barclay employees had gathered at the bar, which Delaney had named Hugo’s. Robert Bard was drinking a beer. He had been on Sark for nine months, cleaning pools for S.E.M.

“I think it’s massively inconsequential,” he said, when I asked him about the situation. “The Barclays pay decent wages, and, because of that, now a lot of the über-millionaires can’t get the staff that they used to be able to pay fuck-all to mow the lawn.”

Kevin Delaney goes to karaoke on Monday nights. I knew that because, my first day on Sark, I had stopped by the tourist office (the official one—Delaney has set up his own welcome bureau). A local girl named Sara was at the desk. Which side was she on? “I’m Switzerland,” she said. “I stay out of the drama.”

Sara invited me to stop by the Bel Air pub that night. When I arrived, I couldn’t find her. As someone warbled “Bohemian Rhapsody,” I struck up a conversation with a patron at the bar. “Boss man’s sitting in there, but I didn’t tell you that,” my new friend whispered.

Delaney was in the pub’s other room. A powerful-looking man with spiky hair and creases around his eyes, he was wearing a striped dress shirt and a blazer. He had a cornflower tucked into the lapel, and wore a crucifix charm on a gold chain. I walked up and introduced myself. Delaney was guarded but garrulous. He said that he would consider meeting me later in the week. But first, he said, I must visit Brecqhou, which the Barclays had opened to visitors for the first time in the spring.

“Democracy will come to Sark, and I’ll live to see it,” he said as he took his leave.

I bought a ticket for the Brecqhou tour (£37) at the Sark Estate Management tourist office. The desk clerk was from France. Most of my fellow-tourists seemed to be staying at the Barclays’ hotels. We milled around waiting for the tractor-bus that would take us to the harbor. But first a man in a white dinner jacket herded us into a red room that smelled like a new car. We were given bottles of water. “Can I get your attention, please?” he said. “The only rule on Brecqhou is no photography of the buildings. You’re very lucky, because, this trip, you’re going to be going to the Brecqhou bookshop, so please feel free to buy a Brecqhou book or a Brecqhou stamp.”

On the tractor-bus, he asked if I’d been to Brecqhou before.

“No, is it nice?”

“Just don’t have any expectations, and your head will explode.”

We pulled up to the island on the Brecqhou Lass. The English botanist Cecil P. Hurst, who spent a week on Brecqhou in 1902, cataloguing rare ferns, described it as being “in the happy position of being an island without a history.” Before the Barclays arrived, it was a windswept wilderness, barely arable and notable mostly for being overrun by rabbits. Oil leaked from the pipes of a Lutyens-inspired manor house. “There really was no alternative to knocking the lot down and starting again,” Peter J. Rivett writes in “Brecqhou: A Very Private Island.” (The Barclays liked the book enough to commission a little monument to Rivett on Brecqhou.) In the fall of 1993, the Barclays initiated Project 95, importing four hundred and fifty men to live in a camp, with its own pub and water-treatment plant. Within two years, they had dug a new harbor. In December, 1996, the Barclays ate their Christmas goose in the castle dining room, under turrets flying the Union Jack.

We disembarked and began to hike up a steep hill. The path was paved, the flower beds perfectly edged. A green trash can with gold letters read “Litter.” Plaques let us know we were on Castle Road. It looked as though someone had bought out the entire contents of a Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue.

As we rounded a corner, the castle came into view, looming over the water. The Barclays’ motto, “Aut agere aut mori” (“Do or Die”), had been inscribed over the door, flanked by shields emblazoned with the family crest (ships and Celtic crosses). In front of the house, on a bluff overlooking the water, there were actually cannons.

Aidan Monaghan, the estate’s deputy manager, showed us around the grounds. “What you have to realize,” he said, “is that, in 1994, there wasn’t a plant, a tree, or a bush here.” The Barclays, he said, had put in a hundred and fifty thousand plants—in more than two thousand varieties, many of them native to South Africa and New Zealand. They had dug up hunks of land and piled them on the southwest slopes to diminish the effect of the wind. We toured an olive grove, admired a plaque commemorating a visit by Baroness Thatcher, and peeked inside a chapel that was inspired by one that the Barclays had admired on Guernsey. The crypt had as many electrical outlets as a conference center. Eventually, we reached a lily pond modelled on the one at Giverny, down to a lacquered red bridge.

“See, this is all French granite,” Monaghan said, indicating the pavement, as we set off again. “Have you got any of that in Sark?”

At the end of the week, word arrived that Delaney had agreed to meet with me. He summoned me to his office, which was cluttered with reading material: Poultry, “The Man in the Arena: Citizenship in a Republic,” “The European Convention on Human Rights,” “Curtain Inspiration.”

Curtains? “Classical interiors is really my thing, if you will,” he said.

Delaney, thrumming with restless energy, suggested that we head out to inspect his investments. The day before, I had witnessed an awkward scene in which Delaney and the seneschal, who have expressed their distaste for each other many times, crossed paths on the Avenue and pretended not to see each other. Despite their forced proximity, Delaney and the Sarkees who oppose him have never attempted to resolve their differences outside the courtroom. The situation is akin to Netanyahu and Ahmadinejad running into each other every day at the deli counter and failing to exchange a word.

Delaney strode along the street, playing the patron. A young woman approached and showed him her new engagement ring.

“Her fiancé works for us at Le Moinerie,” Delaney said, as we walked off. “Gonna have a word with him, because, clearly, he earns far too much!”

Many Sarkees had told me that they wished for a détente with the Barclays, but that that could never happen unless the Newsletter ceased its attacks. They were avidly curious about my meeting with Delaney—a rare foray behind enemy lines. In the spirit of an emissary, I asked Delaney if he had any plans to stop publishing the paper or to tone it down. Had the denunciation of the doctor been a mistake?

“Someone had to tell the story,” he said. He added, “Shakespeare I ain’t, but I’ve always felt that I could push a pen.”

We entered the Dixcart Bay. Delaney nosed around, arranging flowers, lifting drop cloths. Then we sat down at a table in the hotel bar.

“When I arrived, the economy was in despair,” he said. “It had been stripped apart by Sark Lark. I found a society that was lacking a moral compass. My vision was for an aspirational community. Fairly uncomplicated, I thought.”

Delaney said that he “had expected reservations and a potential for misunderstanding in some quarters,” but that he had underestimated the resistance he would face. “I’d read about feudalism, but to actually come and watch it—it infiltrates every aspect of people’s lives.”

“Like lots of things in life, it wouldn’t take a lot to fix it,” he concluded, sipping a piña colada. “I’ll be here to see it, I promise you that.”

The second Friday in September, I received a frantic message from Rosie Guille, a Sark conseiller:

There have been lots of sackings of SEM workers, Delaney blaming the feudal establishment/gov for losses in the Guernsey Press.

Delaney, it turned out, had fired ninety-five of Sark Estate Management’s hundred and seventy-three employees, citing an “abysmal” tourist season. Some of them left Sark that day. Others spent the weekend in the pub. Ros Rolls had lost her job in the vegetable garden at Le Moinerie. “We have no idea if it’s just three months, six months, if it will never open again,” she told me. “I don’t trust them, but if I got offered the job back I would probably have to take it, because it’s good work.”

Rosie Guille, a thirty-eight-year-old watercolor artist, grew up on Sark. Her ancestors arrived in 1565, with Helier de Carteret. She has been a conseiller for a year. “I never wanted to be a politician,” she said, when I met her at her house. “I just feel that what is being done to Sark is being done to me personally.” Guille seemed almost to identify physically with the island. Both of her cheeks had erupted in a red rash, a condition she attributed to her stress. Two of her cousins work for the Barclays, she said, making family gatherings difficult. She had been having trouble sleeping. “It’s so sad when we talk about our lives like this,” she said.

Her uncle, Lieutenant Colonel Reg Guille, the island’s seneschal, had been less pensive when I met him at his office, in the Chief Pleas building. “It’s our traditions, and it’s our way of life,” he bellowed. “As a community, we’ve been an independent jurisdiction since 1565, and we had, up until the year 2008, maintained our traditions. We have had changes forced upon us which we, as a people, did . . . not . . . want!”

After I spoke to Rosie Guille, I got on my bike. It was a gorgeous day, blue and crisp. Noticing an open door, I slowed down and stopped at St. Peter’s, Sark’s Anglican church since 1820. I wandered around the cemetery, full of Guilles, de Carterets, long-lived Hamons, their headstones spotted with lichen. In the church’s vestibule, a notice catalogued the payment of pew rents, due at Michaelmas. Stained-glass windows exalted the memory of Guille privates.

In the chancel, between two arches, a tiny stone—black with gray flecks—had been embedded in the wall. A plaque explained that it had been put into place by W. T. Collings, a forebear of the Seigneur, and that it came from the brooch of Florence Wilhelmine, his daughter, who had died when she was eight years old. An emigrant from a nation of immigrants, I thought about my family tree. All four of my paternal great-grandparents had been born in Ireland. My mother’s family had come to America earlier, from Germany. There was some Welsh in the line, but I wasn’t sure how or where. Most of us are the beneficiaries of ancestors who took a risk and went somewhere. The story we know celebrates their enterprise. But what about people like the Guilles, the inheritors of generations of obduracy and caution? What accrues to those who stay? ♦

Lauren Collins began working at The New Yorker in 2003 and became a staff writer in 2008.